…a thought that is separated from the mental road that leads towards it, a thought standing alone and abrupt as an island, is an abstraction in the worst sense of the word, and by the same token is unintelligible. – Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy?, p15

…There is no thought which is not seed as well as fruit… – Emerson, journals, 1826?

This Book is my Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition. – Emerson, journals, Nov-Dec 1833

A writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s he is a lawgiver. – Emerson, Quotation and Originality

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. – Emerson (VIII 176)